Mom Who Tapes Toddler to the Wall So She Can Clean Clearly Needs Help

Parenting small children -- while trying to maintain your patience -- has never been an easy task, and it's one that can throw the best of us off our game. And though discipline may be in order, some courses of action are better left unaccomplished. Shayla Rudolph is an 18-year-old Ohio mom who was arrested after taping her 2-year-old son to the wall as punishment and live-streaming the incident on social media for all to see.

Advertisement

In the video, Shayla appears to be so frustrated with her little guy's messing up her cleaning efforts that she thought taping him to the wall for 15 minutes was the best way to get the unnamed boy to stop.

"You can't clean without them running around, tearing up? Tape them to the wall," Shayla says in a clip of her now-deleted Facebook Live video shared by WSYX ABC 6 News. "You can't cook or none of that, because they running around? Tape them to the wall."

At one point during the video, Mom poses with her crying son as she says, "You've got the best mommy in the whole wide world."

Needless to say, some of Shayla's viewers didn't think the video was a laughing matter and contacted a local news station, which soon led to Children's Services paying Mom a visit that sadly inspired yet another Facebook Live video.

"They called Children's Services on me. Now he [Shayla's son] in the corner, so what you gonna do?" Shayla is heard saying in a clip of her second video shared by WSYX ABC 6 News. "F*cking call Children's Services now. You can f*cking have his a** -- I don't give a f*ck. This time, you can take him."

This breaks my heart for so many reasons. As a mother of a newly 3-year-old child (I also have a 1½-year-old who helps keep the party going), I get it. I get the frustration. I get being tired. And I get needing to vent. There's a reason why people refer to certain age groups as "the terrible twos" or "the horrible threes," because parenting during this time can be tough.

... But taping a child -- who's likely so terrified and doesn't know what he did so wrong to be punished in that way -- is just not the way to go, and now the family is torn apart.

Just hearing that poor boy cry his heart out and moan (WSYX ABC 6 News reports Mom taped her son's mouth shut during the incident) is pure agony.

If anything good can come out of this situation, I truly hope it does. Mom is so young, and while that certainly does not justify her actions in any way, she has so much life left -- and hopefully time to get help and make improvements. I don't know if there's anyone in her inner circle who can intervene in a positive and productive way, but I truly cross my fingers they do.